IIDA AWARDS
iidaawards
j.c. architecture
Happier Cafe, Taipei, Taiwan
INTERIOR DESIGN SHOW DAILY 2017
12
Sharing happiness is a worthwhile goal, as almost anyone would agree. And that was the idea behind opening a self-service
café, operated on an honor system. Approached to design such a project in the Taiwan city of Taipei, Johnny Chiu responded
with the idea of paper. What if we could make a space where you can be a child, happy to draw on everything?
he thought. Why don’t we even create furniture out of paper? So that’s precisely what J.C. Architecture did—with about
12,000 linear feet on which customers can leave drawings or inspiring messages for whoever happens to drop in next.
Using rolls of brown paper thick and strong enough to resist dripping coffee mugs not to mention shuffling feet, he
constructed a surprisingly graceful collection of nooks, tunnels, canopies, beds, and even a paper pup tent for romantic
tête-à-têtes. The rolls can unfurl to reveal clean, new writing surfaces or wind back up to transport to different locations.
(The lease for the current 4,300-square-foot space, in former military barracks, is temporary.)
According to Chiu, customers haven’t been shy about adding to the mélange: “After two weeks, it was like wow.” Words
and pictures were everywhere. —Winifred Bird
NORA WANG; MARIA ISABEL LIMA: PROJECT TEAM.
EDNESDAY
ZACH HONE

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IIDA AWARDS
lehrer architects la
Milken Community Schools, Los Angeles
INTERIOR DESIGN SHOW DAILY 2017
14
High on a hillside, overlooking the infamously traffic-clogged
405 freeway through Los Angeles, Milken Community
Schools occupies an 11-acre campus. The upper school
consists of four unusual buildings, each with levels that step
outward as they descend the slope. Connection between
the buildings is lateral, across outdoor terraces.
Lehrer Architects LA was commissioned to transform two
of these structures. The first houses the Guerin Institute for
Advanced Sciences, where the curriculum includes robotics
and a fabrication lab affiliated with MIT. The second is home
to the Architecture + Design Institute, exposing students to
the craft as it is practiced in the commercial, residential, and institutional realms.
Every project “needs a big idea,” Michael B. Lehrer notes, and there’s no doubt about this one. “It’s all about
seamless indoor-outdoor living, learning, and being.” To eliminate the buildings’ dark, inward-facing classrooms,
replacing them with light-filled environments befitting the Southern California locale, and to take advantage of
the previously underused terraces, Lehrer stripped the buildings down to their structural steel.
Rebuilt, they share the same design vocabulary. Standouts include skylights and, as he puts it, “animated
flooring of epoxy and paint.” The latter literally bridges indoors and out when garage-style doors fold up to
enable classrooms to spill onto the terraces. —Edie Cohen
NERIN KADRIBEGOVIC; ERIK ALDEN: PROJECT TEAM.
EDNESDAY
MICHAEL B. LEHRER